Industry chamber Assocham on Saturday demanded postponing GST implementation, saying that taxpayers will find it difficult to comply with the provisions of the new indirect tax regime as the IT network is not yet ready.
In a letter to Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, Assocham said existing assessees have not yet migrated to the GSTN portal due to reasons like non-familiarity with IT tools as well as registration process. It said that during the current phase of GST migration for existing assessees, the server was constantly under maintenance. “This raises huge question as to whether the IT infrastructure has been appropriately tested. It also raises questions as to whether this system can survive in the GST era when it had undergone maintenance during the second phase of migration when the traffic was restricted only to migration,” Assocham Secretary General DS Rawat said.
There are at present about 80 lakh excise, service tax and VAT assessees, of which 64.35 lakh have already migrated to the portal of GST Network -- the company readying the IT backbone for GST regime.
Migration window, which closed on June 15, will again open on June 25. There were reports of traders complaining of glitches in the GSTN software for migration.